Structural components such as airframes, automobiles, bridges, etc., are subjected to various types of forces throughout their intended design life. These forces create stresses in the structure that can eventually cause wear, damage, and the possible failure of the structure. As such, fatigue and structural analysis of many structural components (structural components is also referred herein as structural elements or elements) is important during the design process. Fatigue and structural analyses provide structural designers with critical information used to determine the likelihood and the causes of fatigue related structural failures. Once the structural designers have the results of the fatigue and structural analyses, they can design the individual elements and the overall structure so as to withstand the anticipated stress levels over the design lifetime.
Fatigue and structural analyses are particularly important for structures that are subject to extreme forces over the lifetime of the structure. For instance, aircraft structures experience a variety of intense forces as they repeatedly take off, fly, perform various maneuvers and land over the lifetime of the aircraft. These forces create stresses internally in the structure, which may cause wear, damage, and possible failure of the structure if it is not properly designed to withstand the anticipated stresses.
In general, fatigue and structural analyses are performed using a series of analysis tools. The tools typically include customized computer programs for a specific structural design (e.g., an F-15 fighter aircraft). The programs typically do not interact with each other directly and are often hosted on computer platforms that cannot communicate with one another. As such, specially trained analysts must be involved throughout the design process to check, modify, and translate the inputs and outputs of each computer program. The fatigue and structural analysis process is time consuming and inefficient because designers must delay their structural design work until specially trained fatigue analysts develop “fatigue allowables” (the maximum repeated stress a structural component can withstand without failure) for each specific structural element. Development of the fatigue allowables is time consuming because it involves determining the anticipated loading throughout each component's design life, generating the fatigue life prediction of each component based on the loading and material properties of the component, and relaying this information back to the structural designer. The designer must then compute the maximum stress in the component based on its current configuration and compare that stress to the fatigue allowable. If the component is determined to have an inadequate fatigue life, the designer must change the configuration of the component and repeat the maximum stress analysis process.
The fatigue and structural analysis processes used in the past are also inflexible because they are tailored to specific computer platforms. And, typically, there are multiple computing platforms involved in the process requiring translation of intermediate results to different computer platforms that are not compatible with one another. For example, when developing the fatigue allowables, different computer applications are generally required to determine the anticipated loading throughout each component's design life, generate the fatigue life prediction of each component based upon the loading and material properties of the component, and compute the maximum stress in the component based upon its current configuration.
For the reasons discussed above, there exists a need for an automated fatigue and structural analysis system that combines and manages the separate fatigue and structural analysis tools such that analysts without specialized training and on various computer platforms may quickly obtain useful fatigue and structural analysis results. Specifically, the need is for a fatigue and structural analysis system that automatically accesses and runs the appropriate fatigue and structural analysis tools to quickly analyze user-provided information regarding a structural component and provide an immediate report of the fatigue and structural analysis results without further manual input.